The
climate in the handheld development world is rapidly changing. With
two new major pieces of hardware on the way, Sony’s PSP and Nintendo’s
DS, and a number of more niche handhelds already on the market (GP32,
Gizmondo, Zodiac), smaller handheld game creators are starting to
feel out their places in the expanding industry.

WayForward
is a particularly interesting example of such a company, having
established a small cult following for its Capcom-published original
IP title, Shantae for the Game Boy Color, and also garnering a decent,
if low-key reputation for licensed portable titles such as Spongebob
Squarepants: The Movie and Godzilla: Domination for Game
Boy Advance, Wendy: Every Witch Way for Game Boy Color, as
well as PC value titles that include Pearl Harbor: Defend The
Fleet. It’s also worked on a host of educational and kid-friendly
products for PC CD-ROM, learning-specific ‘consoles’, and other
more exotic hardware.

However,
like many notable game companies before it, (Colecovision, Tiger
Telematics), the Valencia, California-based firm’s beginnings lie
in the fabrication industry. WayForward’s CEO John Beck explains:

"We
were founded in 1990 by a guy named Voldi Way, and he had previously
had a company that did software for sheet metal fabrication, which
he founded at the tender age of 14. With a couple of partners, he
had grown that company into a $5 million annual concern. In 1990,
he broke off to form WayForward. Early on, we did console work for
a variety of platforms; Super Nintendo, Sega CD, some of the 8-bit
systems… Later on, we started doing PC CD-ROM product in the educational
genre and largely focused in on character animation as one of our
core skill-sets. Because of that, we became sort of a contract house
focused on developing interactive products built on licensed brands."

The as-yet unreleased Shantae Advance for GBA

It's
this very tendency to work on a host of smaller licensed
properties which allows WayForward to continue as a going concern.
Beck comments:

"The
capital requirements for that team size are built into the budget
of the project, since we're primarily a work-for-hire developer.
And it's an amazingly stable structure, surprisingly stable, because
of the fact that your capital needs are being met by the project
you're working on. Larger developers that have to sustain large
internal teams, I've been reading, have experienced difficulty when
the workflow stops. But with a smaller project and with more diverse
platforms and customers, we've kept ourselves going quite nicely."

Although
this description is somewhat different from stability concerns felt
by other smaller developers, Beck continues by explaining how limited
outsourcing helps keep the team lean: "We utilize external teams
for specific modular content work. For example if we need character
modeling done, it's a very well-defined, modular task that can be
easily shopped out to an external company, and we'll take advantage
of that. For the most part, we don't. We prefer to use internal
team members to do work. But we will staff up with freelance help
as project needs dictate."

WayForward
has made their most recent titles on Nintendo-branded handheld
platforms. This is not by design, but rather current industry convention
in the handheld market. A platform-agnostic policy certainly helps
diversify a small company's interests, but the level of support
from the publishers is a serious factor. Beck elaborates: "We've
been interested in other portable systems (Zodiac, Gizmondo, GP32),
but the limiting factor is the investment it takes for us to port
our engine and art tool to them, relative to how much work we expect
to get. So if we have an opportunity come up, where someone offers
us a job doing a product for one of these platforms, or a port as
the case may be, we'll look at the investment involved, and what
additional work we can expect to generate from that investment,
and make the judgment on whether or not to pursue it. Recently we've
been involved in doing some games for plug and play [‘TV game’-style]
consoles. And these games run on specialized hardware, they're embedded
applications. And we were able to very simply port our game engine
and art tool to the platform."

According
to Beck, the plug and play consoles are relatively simple to develop
for. He explains: "In some ways they're even more powerful (than
the GBA). The audio, for example, is really good, but you still
know you're not going to have the hardware capabilities to do point
of view 3D shooters. The first plug and play project we worked on
was just a demo that the company was doing experimentally in-house,
so it kind of dragged on for a long time. But we're working on one
now that's going to be a 4-month turnaround. So it's very similar
to GBA, but by my judgment that's a long schedule for the work involved.
It could probably be done in three months."

Working
with publishers on contracted projects is one thing, but getting one’s
own IP published is entirely another. WayForward released Shantae,
its first significant in-house intellectual property, for the Game Boy
Color in mid 2002, published by Capcom. Creative lead Matt Bozon talks
about the experience of getting the game actually published:

“Well,
it was a chore. It was definitely an uphill battle. I think the key to
that was having so much of it done up front. We really financed that
internally, and it was a labor of love. So that game, I think it was
probably about 90% complete when Capcom picked it up.”

Matt
continues: “So aside from that, I think that the industry is…the people
are very friendly and encouraging to original properties and ideas. But
the way that the industry is structured, though the people were very
welcoming of [Shantae], their jobs in many cases were hindering
them from doing anything about it. People could basically be a fan of
the game or what we were trying to do, but they didn't have the ability
to necessarily get it published, or through their marketing, or they
were hindered by how much space they had at retail, or how much it
would cost to manufacture the cartridges. The money was definitely the
enemy, the cost of marketing, the risk. It was just too big of a risk
for a lot of people.”

Shantae
was one of the last games ever released in North America for the Game
Boy Color, and critically well-received, but WayForward has had a
difficult time getting funding for a sequel. Now, once again, the
company finds itself at a hardware crossroads. Matt continues: “[The
reasons for the next Shantae game not yet finding a publisher]
are not exactly the same. I think that the second title is a little
more proven - there's an interest in it. So it's not a complete risk,
but at the same time I think we're in a really funny situation, because
we have one title out there that people really like, and there's almost
a hesitation to do it until [publishers] can do it on multiple SKUs.
Like, if they want to do it, now they want to do it on everything. It's
almost like it gets more difficult to release a single game on a single
platform. That's the impression I get, anyway. Almost like it needs to
grow, or it'll be stuck in obscurity.”

As
a result, WayForward has been working with other technologies, recently
developing the Nintendo DS instant messenging/trading software Ping Pals for publisher THQ. Bozon talks a little about the way the company shows new tech to prospective clients:

Ping Pals for the Nintendo DS

“We've dabbled a lot at WayForward, and any new technology that we're working on, we try to see if there's a place for [Shantae] in demonstrating it. Also, we have a lot of assets from the Shantae
game, and from other attempts at things like building 3D models of her,
so it's easy to demo with. So it almost naturally makes it that, when
we dabble in some new technology, we'll end up with a Shantae
demo of some kind that could evolve into a game. But usually, if
there's not someone partnered with us, and financing us, it's back to
the labor of love. That’s only whenever there's extra time and extra
resources, which is pretty rare for a place that's a contractor, a
developer for hire like us. Typically, we don't have a lot of people
sitting around with nothing to do. *laughs*”

Though
the company usually works with licenses, WayForward has a tendency to
introduce unusual or intriguing gameplay elements into its titles, such
as the ability to flip your playing field upside-down in the Game Boy
Color game Wendy: Every Witch Way. Matt explains why the
company takes this approach: “I don't think we think we're doing
anything more than what we should, because we're being hired by people
to - in a lot of cases - bring a brand to gaming for the first time.
Sometimes it's a new show, or a character that hasn't been done in
games yet. It seems like that's part of our responsibility, just giving
these characters or properties a good game. So the fact that other
developers don't, or think that they can get by with something
mediocre, is actually very strange.”

He
continues: “From our point of view, most of the people at WayForward
who are directors, or are influential, animators or even a lot of the
programmers, they're very into filmmaking, they're all entertainers,
almost everybody here is an entertainer. They want a stage to play on,
and for them it's an opportunity. People definitely want to express
themselves, and find some really cool angle, like some neat way of
controlling a character. We like to add something to the brand if
possible, instead of just soaking up the brand and making it do all the
work.”

While licenses may be the company’s bread and butter, WayForward is still looking for possible platforms for its next original Shantae game. In Matt Bozon’s words:

“As
long as places like DS and PSP are accepting to some of the work we've
already done, I don't see why it couldn't come out on one of those
systems. Especially the DS, I mean, the DS is similar enough to the GBA
that the game could pretty much be directly put on it, but it's that
old enemy of 'I don't just want to put something on the second screen.'
We have a solid plan to kind of tear it up and build a new foundation
of gameplay underneath it that incorporates the two screens, so it'd be
worth playing and people would feel that it was intended for the
system. And so we'll just have to see what happens with DS development
in the next few months.”

While
WayForward is excited about the new DS technology, they are wary of the
longevity of the system. Matt argues: “I definitely like what it
represents. There are things about it that I wonder if developers are
going to understand how to properly use. I get the impression a lot of
times that – I think Nintendo had an inspiration, and I'm not sure if
everybody really understands how to carry that.

It
has a lot of things about it that make it unique, but the things that
make it unique also make it be that once you dedicate towards making a
DS game that can really only exist on DS, there's a lot of risk for
people. In a lot of cases, you're making something that's completely
untried, and I'm not seeing enough things that are untried, I'm seeing
a lot of things on the system so far where it's like "well we have a
second screen, what can we put there?" And I think that's a backwards
approach, I think it should be: you're going to make a game that has
two screens. You've got to look at what you have available to you, you
know we're going to make a game that's about two screens, so maybe it's
a game about two points of view.

For
example, if you're going to make a movie that had two screens on it,
like sometimes you'll go to an attraction, and they'll have something
weird where they'll have two screens or two objects of attention. The
attraction wouldn't show a movie on one screen, and on the other screen
roll credits, or just text. There would be something equally engaging
on both screens, that would have your attention divided, or from time
to time: 'OK, look here, now look over here.' I think they'd have
entertainment on both screens, I think that's what it boils down to,
with a lot of these games, I see entertainment on one screen, then
something that's just functions on the other screen.”

Being
a developer-for-hire, WayForward is naturally interested in the PSP as
well, but Matt himself worries about bigger publishers hogging the
spotlight.

“My
experience has been GBC to GBA, and the PSP is kind of a bigger jump,
and it seems like the PSP is attracting a lot of the people who were
doing PS2 and Xbox titles. That's just me as a designer, I know that
WayForward itself has tons of interest in it. And what I'm really
curious to see on PSP is how some of the hand drawn animation type
games. I want to see what Street Fighter is like, or Metal Slug, or things like Symphony of the Night. I'm really hoping that we see some of those games that were friendly to PSOne 2D.”

In
Matt’s mind, the DS may be more friendly to a 2D gaming aesthetic,
especially with its digital and touch-screen interfaces. Matt argues:
“As far as this stuff goes, one of the things I like about DS is that
it's not so far from GBA. It welcomes 2D gaming, and it also welcomes
2D game concepts in 3D space. I think that a lot of times people have
difficulty limiting themselves, because if they're on PS2 and they can
move through all that space, it's hard to pull back and restrain
yourself and say, even if it's a fully 3D game, we're going to confine
our gameplay to moving on two planes. For instance, older games have
significant advantages over newer games in elements like high and low
attacks - a character that can simply attack high or attack low. That
kind of thing isn't done a lot in newer titles, because if the game is
fully 3D, you can't deal in things that are as abstract concepts as
"Let's attack from the side, because we can have a nice clean view."
These elements are small nuances of gameplay that you relied heavily on
before. But now, with a lot of the 3D games, all of the movements are
very broad, or you're attacking in hemispheres. You get large attack
spaces, and it becomes more clunky and less precise.

So
I'm looking forward to seeing some of the beautiful things that 3D
offers, alongside some of the confines of 2D that you'll get from the
D-pad or the stylus - things that are 2D interfaces.”

Matt
elaborates: “[There is a lot of] potential that I hope we get to see
used. Like, for example, there are things built into the DS that are
really neat if they can be utilized properly. For example, there's this
way that you can get your 3D images to be composited in with the 2D
stuff. It's basically like taking 3D snapshots and using them as
background layers in 2D. And it's really clever, because I can't even
get my mind around the kinds of things that can be done with that.

So,
many of the [games] that are based on the touch screen seem to be
gimmicks or one-trick ponies, that kind of thing. I hope it doesn't
mean that we don't get full-fledged games though, on DS. I see a lot of
things that are individual ideas, but a lot of the time they haven't
gone all the way into becoming fully realized games yet.”

But
as interesting as the DS hardware is on paper, it remains to be seen
whether or not developers will understand it, let alone the consumers.
Matt’s final word is a cautionary one for himself as much as other
developers:

“When
I heard that there were going to be two screens I thought 'That's cool,
how are they going to have entertainment on both? And I don't always
see it. I'm worried that if enough people don't understand how to do
this that pretty soon – because the public is only going to be as
educated as the people developing the games, and they'll see what they
see."